Monthly Archives: March 2010

If you were wondering where I was/am and why I wasn’t blogging it’s because I currently don’t have Internet at my new place. I have signed up for it and I expect my DSL modem will show up in the near future, but for the moment I am not connected at home.

And that’s okay. I have books to read and music to make. Photos to take. That kind of stuff. The daily photo project is still ongoing. New photos will be uploaded eventually…

Photo: Brian checks the mix on a finished track we made in his apartment. I think the track was called The Haunted Nintendo.

I was in an electronic music group called Post Post IDM. Well, technically I still am but now there’s an ocean between me and my collaborators that is changing the dynamic of our work.

Post Post IDM is me and two good friends Brian Westcott and Leif Olson. Post Post IDM’s initial phase involved live laptop jams where we showed up with our laptops, synced our software to a beat, and generated music (or noise) as best we could using prepared samples and instruments. Every session was totally different. We never knew what we had prepared or even what equipment anyone would bring. However, over time we developed a dynamic. We were able to hold back our impulses to take control of the song and let things happen naturally. It was a tremendously rewarding way to work. Our laptop jam sessions are one of the things I miss most about Calgary.

In the end our sound was languid, but kind of creepy. We all liked weird loud noises.

I’m packaging up a few of our produced songs into EPs. Here is one finished EP for download:

Self Help Yourself came from our last three-person jam session, and it’s very experimental and weird. My main instrument here was a walkman containing self-help tapes I found at a garage sale, and a distortion patch in Ableton Live. Brian was using a noise generator plugin for Reaktor and Leif had a MIDI wind controller and some strange samples. I really like what came out, though I won’t claim it’s easy listening. I think it’s a statement on the ineffectiveness of self-help tapes on the truly mentally disturbed.